Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  A tap-tap-tapping at the window. I drop from the air, feeling guilty. A man in silver and green power armor is hovering just outside my window, beckoning me to come outside.

  Or, you know, maybe the Legion Pacifica will come pay me a visit before I’m ready. That could happen, too.

  The Legion is the cape outfit for New Port City and parts beyond. Their territory is everything west of the Rockies, north of California and Nevada, and south of Canada. They’re the most prestigious team on the West Coast, and possibly the country. With Dreadnought as their anchor, they haven’t faced a serious home-turf fight in ten years, and spend most of their time assisting the eternally jumbled and fractured Californian capes or working with the continent-wide Northern Union team to handle the really big stuff, like the asteroid that almost hit us last year. With Dreadnought’s death, that might have to change.

  I slide across my bed and open the window. The armored figure is floating on whining jets that vent from his back and feet. Of course I recognize him, he’s Carapace. My stomach flops over.

  “We need to talk,” says Carapace in a filtered, almost mechanical voice.

  “Oh,” I say. “Um. Sure. Let me…let me get a sweater and I’ll come out.”

  Carapace nods, and leans back. His jets flare and he squirts up and away from my house. Holy crap, the Legion wants to talk to me! Yeah, it makes sense, but holy crap, the Legion wants to talk to me!

  My fingers are clumsy as I pull open my dresser and pull out a sweatshirt. I put it on, take it off, and put it on right side out. I decide to float to the window so he won’t see my knees shaking. The night air is cold and damp against my skin, and I wobble a little in the air as I leave my house behind. This is the first time I’ve flown in the open air. I was hoping to do this in private. Carapace is hovering twenty or thirty yards away, and maybe two dozen yards above the ground. It’s an overcast night, but the clouds are thin enough that the moon’s light punches through and reflects off the silver highlights of the plate-armored woman floating next to him. It’s Valkyrja, and the moment I recognize her my cheeks start burning. Did he see the poster I have of her on my wall? Did she?

  The bushes in our cramped back yard tickle my feet and I realize my concentration has drifted and I’m sinking. The lattice is clear in my mind when I reach for it, and I shoot back up into the air, arrest my momentum, and approach them under controlled flight.

  “Uh, hi,” I say to two of the most important people in the world. Wow. I am a dork.

  “Hello. I am Carapace, and this is Valkyrja,” says Carapace, as if they would need to introduce themselves anywhere in North America. “And you…are Daniel Tozer.” Nobody outside the Legion has seen his face. His helmet gives him a metal glare that’s hard to face straight-on.

  “Danielle,” I mutter.

  “But your legal name is Daniel Tozer,” he says, like this is very important to be clear on and he’s a little confused. “You were present when Dreadnought was murdered.”

  “What Carapace means to say,” says Valkyrja in a low, husky voice, “is we know that receiving the mantle can be an abrupt and difficult transition.” Up close I can see the pale blue nimbus that surrounds her wings. It’s well known—okay no, it’s well known to her fans, at least—that she doesn’t fly by flapping them, but by some kind of magic contained within them. Her blonde hair spills out from under her helmet and down her shoulders. “It is no easy thing for any mortal to come into such power and retain herself. Nor for a child to do the same.”

  Carapace looks at her for a long moment before turning back to me. “Yes. As a minor coming into powers within our jurisdiction, we are prepared to offer you guidance and support,” he says. “This is contingent upon good behavior, of course.” There’s something in his tone that’s hard to read through the mechanical filtering, but it sort of sounds like he thinks good behavior will be a problem for me.

  “You want me to…to join the—”

  “No,” he says. “We do not accept minors into the Legion at this time.”

  “You would be a provisional member,” says Valkyrja as if he hadn’t spoken. “You would be welcome in our halls and at our tables, but we would assign you no duties, nor grant you a stipend.” She looks at Carapace and raises her eyebrow. “That is a fair description of the program you designed for young champions, is it not?”

  “…yes,” says Carapace. He continues, sounding like he’s reading a script he’d rather not. “We encourage all young metahumans to take advantage of the opportunities we provide.”

  “Um. I wasn’t—my body didn’t always look this way. Do you think you can figure out why the mantle changed me?” I want to know. Not so I can turn back, but just so I’ll know. There’s so much about my own body I don’t understand.

  “Very likely,” says Valkyrja.

  “I’d like that a lot, please.”

  “Can you manage the flight across the city?” asks Valkyrja. “There are things we would discuss with you, and one of our associates will need to examine you.”

  “I think so.”

  “Then lead on, child. We fly to Legion Tower.”

  I dart back down into my room to lock my door and turn out the lights; with any luck my parents will think I turned in early. A few minutes later, I’m ten stories high, zipping across the city toward the glittering night skyline. I’ve been up high before in tall buildings and airplanes, but nothing really prepares you for being a hundred feet in the air with nothing between you and the ground but a long scream. The barrel rolls come naturally, and soon I’m laughing.

  Things are getting better all the time.

  Chapter Five

  Legion Tower is a landmark in New Port. Fifty floors high, a full ten to twenty floors taller than most of the buildings around it, it stands at the northern end of the downtown core of towers along the southeast shoreline of Puget Sound. The bottom floors are rented out as office space, but nobody really knows what they do with the top thirty. The tower is a throwback to the days of stone and steel, with its almost cathedralesque styling and art deco arches soaring to meet each other at the tower’s apex. At the top a huge balcony protrudes from the building’s east side, mirroring the one on the west. The balconies are large enough to land military helicopters, but the main thing to notice is their lack of guardrails. They’re not meant for casual loitering. They’re entryways for people who can fly. We zip around and between skyscrapers downtown and approach Legion Tower from the south, bank around, and come up on the east landing pad. As the lip of the balcony comes up fast I realize my speed is much higher than I thought. It’s okay to land with your face, right?

  The impact is jarring all the way down to the root of my spine. I go end over end for a good twenty feet, and skid to a stop spread-eagled on my back. A week ago, something like this would have splattered me all over the landing pad. Tonight, it rips the knee of my jeans, and that’s about it.

  “I’m okay,” I say, getting to my feet. Valkyrja sets down gently next to me, and Carapace drops to the ground with a clank a little ways off. In front of a pair of double glass doors, a woman in a lab coat waits for us. Her dark hair is pulled back in a braid reaching most of the way down her back, and her steel-rimmed glasses are perfectly circular. Her cigarette tip flares, and then she says, “Welcome to Legion Tower. I’m Doc Impossible. You ever had a physical, kid?”

  I’ve had two in the past week. “It’s my new hobby.”

  Doc Impossible smiles, and blows a stream of smoke back over her shoulder. “We’re going to get along fine. I’ll see you two at the briefing,” she says to Carapace and Valkyrja. They head one way and Doc Impossible beckons me to follow her in another.

  She leads me to an elevator, which drops us deep into the building. Maybe I expected the elevator to be…I dunno, special? It doesn’t feel like I’m really here. The elevator opens on a floor that appears to only have one small antechamber before another door, a massive sliding thing that clicks and thunks elaborately before it
opens and closes. Doc Impossible stabs out her cigarette in an ashtray next to the door, fishes in her jacket’s inner pocket for a piece of gum, and pops it in her mouth. She doesn’t chew it; she just crimps it in her back teeth and holds it there. We pass through an airlock, where a field of golden light sweeps over us, up and down, forward and back. The panel above the door to the exit lights up with an anime-style happy face, and dings.

  “Welcome to my lab,” says Doc Impossible as the airlock’s magnetic bolts thunk open, and a door like a vault opens in front of us. “We might be here a while. Lavatory’s over there, but make sure you stand still for decon once you’re done.”

  Doc Impossible’s lab takes up this entire floor. The place is wall-to-wall hypertech, the superscience that brings us wonders from a thousand possible futures, devices that are decades or centuries beyond what baseline tech can manage. Nobody really knows what makes hypertech possible. What’s obvious is that some people, most of whom don’t show any indication whatsoever of being metahuman, seem to have a knack for the development and manufacture of technology far in advance of what’s normally considered the state of the art. The only reason we’re not all living in space stations orbiting a neutron star or something like that is because hypertech has—well, it has problems. The biggest is probably that it’s amazingly hard to replicate, to the point where the government has officially given up trying to get mass production working. (Nobody believes them when they say that, though. The Pentagon uses as much hypertech as they can get their hands on, but it’s all custom-made gear that’s hard to replace.) At first, some hypertech developers tried to explain their work, but it never clicked with the mainstream. Experiments failed when universities tried to replicate them, functioning devices sometimes contradicted known laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera, and so now they’re mainly a community unto themselves, studiously ignored by mainstream science, which tends to mutter and grumble every time the “speculative technology” is mentioned.

  Every hypertech artifact has to be more or less handcrafted, often out of components which themselves require days or weeks of work. Reliability is a huge issue, too, since it’s all buggier than a Louisiana swamp, and if you didn’t make it yourself you probably won’t know how to fix it. Safety can be an issue, as well. All those metahumans who get their powers in lab accidents? Guess what kind of lab they were working in. And not all lab accidents are happy ones. People have died in really horrible ways.

  But that doesn’t make it any less amazing to step into the future. Everywhere I look there is glass and steel, with displays and readouts projected against floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor glows softly white. You’d think it would feel sterile and maybe a little cold, but everything is colorful, inviting. The readouts are projected in vibrant colors, so this wall might be five shades of blue, but the room next to it is done up all in green. The air is just the right temperature, and somehow feels soft. Somewhere, there are speakers filtering ambient electronica through the air, gentle rising and falling tunes to comfort you even as you forget they’re there.

  “Holy crap.”

  “You like it? Took me ages to figure out what to do with all this space,” says Doc Impossible. She’s got her hands deep in her lab coat pockets as we walk down a hallway that is daffodil yellow on one side and watery blue on the other. We come to an intersection and encounter a robot that looks like a crash test dummy with a camera for a head, walking a pug. “Hey, make sure he gets it all out this time, okay?” says Doc Impossible. The robot nods at her and heads the way we came, the pug trotting alongside it.

  “You built a robot to walk your dog?”

  “No, I built it to test a new colloquial speech voice interface. Putting it on poop patrol was just a bonus. This way.”

  We take a turn down a hallway and pass a room where the windows have no projections. Inside are two rows of steel pedestals topped with cylindrical glass tanks. Each tank is filled with human brains floating in a soupy liquid, all run through with wires and tubes. Some of them have big chunks replaced with what looks like a bundle of spindly circuitry.

  “What are those?” I ask.

  “Donor brains. Carapace and I are working on a new kind of neurological prosthetic.” Her face lights up as she speaks. “It’s really cool stuff, actually; we’re learning how to program nanomachines to turn neurons into synthetic replacements without interrupting the continuity of consciousness for the patient. Early applications will probably be things like new therapies for Alzheimer’s or MS, but the possibilities are—”

  A chirping noise sounds from a phone deep in one of her jacket pockets, and at the same time the lights under one of the brain tubes switch from white to yellow.

  “Oh, damn!” says Doc Impossible. She throws open the lab door and sweeps inside. In half a moment she’s got the casing to the yellow-lit tank’s pedestal open and is kneeling, elbow deep inside the machine. “I told him! I fucking told him!”

  I poke my head in the lab.

  “What’s going on?

  “These damn Cerita links keep cutting out! The process requires a very steady, very clean power supply. I’d use a hypertech solution but Carapace talked me into using some off-the-shelf components. We’re trying to—shit. Hold on. There.” She looks up. “Hand me that voltmeter. It’s the fat yellow phone-looking thing with the wires coming out of it.”

  There’s a device like that sitting on a table just inside the door. I pick it up and hand it to her.

  “Thank you,” she says, tapping up some program on the machine’s screen. “Anyhow, we’re trying to generalize the technology to baseline tech so that someday it can run without hypertech. I think we should have just gotten the damn thing working first before we got ambitious. This brain right here, we’re trying to convert it to one hundred percent synthetic and still retain its continuity profile. If we could do that, we could make a true neural prosthetic for almost any kind traumatic brain injury. Hell, maybe even immortality is—”

  Something Doc Impossible said finally clicks over in my head. Continuity of consciousness, she said. A horrifying possibility occurs to me. “Wait, you mean these are alive?”

  “Of course not,” says Doc Impossible sharply. She looks up at me, her brow drawn in. “That would be horrible. These are all from dead people. The test data is still good, though.”

  “Oh. Um, sorry.”

  Her lips press thin, but then she shrugs. “Just because we’re doing superscience doesn’t mean we run without an ethics review board, kid.” Doc Impossible closes the hatch and the lights under the brain-tank turn white again.

  The medical examination lab is done up in soothing blues, and once we’re inside Doc Impossible taps a button projected onto the glass. The room’s walls become frosted and nearly opaque for privacy. There’s an examination bed, some counters cluttered with papers and supplies, and a lot of exotic and high-tech equipment I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

  “Okay, kid—ah, do you have something you want me to call you?”

  “Danny.”

  “Okay, Danny. I’ve got eight doctorates and two of them are medical, so it’s nothing I haven’t seen before, but I’m gonna need you to get naked here in a moment.”

  “Right. Uh. Why?”

  “I told you: I’ve got to give you a physical.”

  “Why?”

  “Ah. You see, this has never happened before. Three other people carried the mantle before you, and none of them—”

  “Gotcha.”

  Doc Impossible turns her back, and so with trembling fingers and warming cheeks, I start pulling my shirt off.

  “When you’re indecent, step under that big tube over there.” She gestures vaguely to one side.

  I drop my clothes in a pile, and my underwear on top of that. There is a whoosh of air from around the lower edges of the wall, and suddenly the room is ten degrees warmer, and much more comfortable to be naked in. I step under the tube she indicated, a big thing of thick, curved glass
that slides down from the ceiling to seal against the floor with a hiss. My ears pop. A bulky ring of steel studded with all sorts of what look to be projectors is set around the top. Doc Impossible is looking at a whole interface projected on the wall, including a simulated keyboard hologram floating in mid air. She taps a few buttons and the tube goes opaque.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says, her voice piped in through speakers I can’t see. “This will take a few moments. Try to stand still, please.”

  A clunk, a thunk, and a deep, heavy thrum. The ring of sensors drops down to the floor, and I can see the wall going transparent wherever the sensors are looking in. The sensor ring pulses out thick bars of light. It travels up and down, washes every part of me in light. It feels like being in a flatbed scanner. An aperture opens in the chamber’s ceiling, and a thin hose drops down.

  “Please drink several deep swallows of this,” says Doc Impossible.

  “What is it?” I ask, and then start sucking on the tube hesitantly.

  “Cherry soda,” she says. I take a deep swallow. It’s just the right level of cold and fizzy. “And also enough radioactive contrast dye to light you up like Chernobyl.”

  “What?”

  “You’re wearing the mantle of Dreadnought, Danny. You really think a little thing like cesium is going to hurt you? Now hold still for a moment, I want to watch what it does.”

  The sensor ring drops down again and scans my stomach intensively for a few moments. “Okay, now drink from the tube again.”

  Root beer this time.

  “What’s in that? Cyanide?”

  “Naw. Strychnine.”

  “What could you possibly learn from that?”